Early Scientific Revolution
The era of the '''Early Scientific Revolution' lasted from about 1547 AD until 1598 AD. It began with the end of the reign of Henry VIII in England in 1547 AD, who initiated the English Reformation. It then ended with the Edict of Nantes in 1598 AD, which ended the French Wars of Religion. Out of the ferment of the Renaissance and Reformation there arose in the late 16th century one of the most important developments in European intellectual tradition; the Scientific Revolution. Much of the work done during the late-16th and 17th century is still considered today as the foundation of the major fields of modern science, including mathematics, physics, astronomy, chemistry, biology, and medicine. Scientific advances had little immediate practical effects, but gradually they were applied substantially to inventions in the late 18th century Industrial Revolution. Meanwhile, the social and political upheaval of the Protestant Reformation rolled on in Europe, with turmoil in Catholic France which emerged with a measure of religious, and in Protestant England which moved towards an increasingly staunch Puritanism that would play a role in the subsequent English Civil War. The Reformation also sparked rebellions against their overlords in the Netherlands and Ireland, with starkly contrasting results. History Early Scientific Revolution What has been called a Scientific Revolution (1543-1687) in the 16th and 17th century, profoundly reshaped our understanding of the universe, nature, and ourselves. Its results are still today considered the foundation of all the major fields of modern science, from mathematics to physics, astronomy to chemistry, medicine to biology and botany. The discoveries must first be attributed to the simple cumulative effect of more rapidly and widely circulated ideas and information through the printing press, as well as the spread of literacy. Reading and writing, though not universally diffused, gradually became more widespread, no longer the privilege of a small elite, nor intimately connected with religious rites. None the less the fundamental sources lie deeper than this, in changed intellectual attitudes. Although the work of medieval scientists had been by no means as stagnant and uncreative as it was once the fashion to believe, it suffered from critical limitations. Much of what was considered known about the natural world dated back to the great medieval synthesis of Christian beliefs, with the teachings of ancient authorities such as Aristotle (d. 322 BC), Ptolemy (d. 170 AD), and Galen (d. 210 AD). The dogmatic assertions that the earth was the centre of the universe, or that four elements - fire, air, earth and water - constituted all things, went generally unquestioned for centuries. Any other understanding of the world was a challenge to Church orthodoxy, and tantamount to heresy. Thus, like the Protestant Reformation, the Scientific Revolution was another break from accepted religious teachings. The beginnings of a drastic change in scientific thought owed much to the spirit of inquiry that arose during the Renaissance and Age of Discovery. Exploration and celestial navigation led to the development of better, more accurate astronomical tools, both physical and mathematical, crucial for the advancement of astronomy. The quest for realism of Renaissance artists spurring renewed interest in the study of biology and botany. Another stimulus was to making sense of the new geographical knowledge revealed by exploration, as well as many new observations and specimens brought back from the newly opened Americas. The Scientific Revolution is traditionally assumed to start with the publication in 1543 of On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres ''by Polish astronomer '''Nicolaus Copernicus' (d. 1543). Copernicus studied law in Italy where he befriended the famous astronomer Domenico Maria da Ferrara and became his disciple and assistant. Upon returning to Poland, he worked as private secretary to his uncle, the Bishop of Warmia, which gave him ample time to devote to interest in the orbits of the planets. Copernicus was not a practical astronomer, but a theoretician who studied past observations of the planets positions in the sky. He found that he had to make ever more adjustments to the already complex contortions imposed by the established Ptolemaic system. Questioning Ptolemy's model, Copernicus became intrigued by the notion of a system in which the Earth, like all the planets, revolved around the sun. Testing the idea, he founds that it tallied with the observations much more readily than the geocentric theory. The fit was not yet perfect, because Copernicus continued to assume that the planets moved in circular orbits; an error not corrected until Kepler (d. 1630). His book was published before his death, and was a major event in the history of science. The idea of a heliocentric universe was not revolutionary: among the Ancient Greeks there were rival theories about the cosmos, with the first person known to have proposed such a system being Aristarchus of Samos (c. 270 BC); there was a tradition within Islamic astronomy of criticising Ptolemy, beginning with Ibn al-Haytham (d. 1040) and climaxed in Ibn al-Shāṭir (d. 1375); and Europeans such as Nicole Oresme (d. 1382) had discussed these ideas. Indeed some of Copernicus' illustrations are so similar to those in Islamic treatise that it’s almost impossible that he didn’t have access to them. Thus Copernicus did not so much invent the heliocentric model, as bring it into the mainstream. The next great astronomers were both refugees. Tycho Brahe (d. 1601), a Dane, spent 21-years systematically observing the heavens out of a laboratory provided to him by the king of Denmark, until his patrons death. The much younger Johannes Kepler (d. 1630) was expelled from the university of Graz in Austria for being a Protestant. Both ended up in Prague, where Kepler took Copernicus' heliocentric system, Brahe's observational data, and combined them with his most significant finding. He published Astronomia nova (1609) putting forward the radical and correct proposition that the planets moved in elliptical, rather than circular, orbits. With this last anomaly removed, it was now unmistakably a simpler explanation of observable phenomena than the Ptolemaic version. But the Copernican theory remained a topic of private debate among leading astronomers; the Church establishment, guardian of the truth, was not yet involved. This changed in 1610, when Galileo Galilei (d. 1642) discovered firm proof of that Ptolemy was wrong. He had access a recent invention from the Netherlands; the telescope, tradition credited to Zacharias Janssen Hans Lippershey. His observations with the telescope were first published in 1610, in which he proved the existence of up to ten times as many distant stars, the moon was rough rather than smooth, the sun itself was revolving, and the circling moons of Jupiter. It brought him immediate fame; he was invited to Florence by the Medici, and even well received in Rome at first. Feeling encouraged, Galileo published Account and evidence of the sun spots ''(1613), a work directly stating that Copernicus was right and Ptolemy wrong. This time there was outrage from the Church establishment, culminating in 1616 with the Inquisition warning Galileo to abandon these opinions; the works of Copernicus were condemned as heretical. But Galileo was eventually given permission to publish a comparison of the Copernican and Ptolemaic systems, on the condition that no conclusion was reached as to the truth of either theory. In ''Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632), he prevaricated in the final chapter as required, but the weight of the argument made the scientific conclusion unmistakable. Galileo was subsequently found guilty of heresy by the Inquisition, forced to recant to save his own life, and spent the rest of his days under house arrest. Nevertheless, Copernicus' heliocentric views henceforth dominated scientific thinking. The spirit of scientific inquiry also spread to other fields. In philosophy, René Descartes (d. 1650) is frequently considered the first modern philosopher. His first publication, Discourse on Method (1637), laid the foundations of the Scientific Method and Rationalism. To solve large problems, he proposed carefully breaking them down into smaller inquiries by way of incisive questions; nodeductive reasoning. He further argued for grounding all our ideas in reflection on personal experience and reason, rather than ancient authority and false premises. His best known statement is, "I think, therefore I am", a philosophical proof of existence based on the fact that someone capable of thought necessarily exists. Descartes' work won many followers, one of the most influential being Francis Bacon (d. 1626). Bacon observed the misconceptions clung to by scholars, and prioritised the use of a sceptical and methodical approach. His process of reaching the truth from drawing conclusions from specific facts tested experimentally is now called inductive reasoning. In mathematics, perhaps the most important advance of the 16th-century was the invention of logarithms by John Napier (d. 1617). Bonaventura Cavalieri (d. 1647) and multi-talented Rene Descartes also made progress towards the calculus, and added the power of algebraic methods to geometry. In science, William Gilbert (d. 1603) laid the foundations of the theory of magnetism, and is credited with coining the term "electricity". Willebrord Snellius (d. 1626) found the mathematical law of refraction. While attempting to improve the refining of ores, Georg Agricola (d. 1555) removed the mystery associated with chemistry, while an early chemistry textbook by Jean Beguin (d. 1620) contained the first-ever chemical equations, creating the practical base upon which others could build. In medicine, the theories of Galen (d. 210 AD) that had dominated European thinking for over a millennium began to unravel. Andreas Vesalius (d. 1564) was the first prominent surgeon to take a highly controversial approach to understanding the human body; dissect corpses himself. His gigantic work, The Structure of the Human Body (1543), was published in seven volumes including numerous striking illustrations, and corrected hundred's of Galen's misconceptions. The greatest surgeon of the 16th-century, Ambroise Paré (d. 1590), rose from humble origins as a barber's assistant, to a pioneer in surgical techniques for battlefield wounds. He also invented several surgical instruments. The capstone of the Scientific Revolution is usually attributed to Isaac Newton's Principia published in 1687, which formulated the laws of motion and universal gravity, thereby completing the synthesis of a new cosmology. For all that, few Europeans would have been aware of these great changes even towards the end of the 18th-century. The glitter of modernity can easily deceive us. Throughout the 17th century, many monarchs continued to rely on court astrologers; Kepler himself attempted to confirm the power of astrology, though was unable to do so. In England, the king's touch was long believed to cure certain skin diseases. Barely twenty years before 1800 the last witch was burned to death in Europe; Anna Göldi (d. 1782) of Glarus in Switzerland, The practice of leeching blood, based on an ancient system of balancing the four bodily humors, continued in medicine well into the 19th century; it probably contributed to the death of George Washington in 1799. Meanwhile, popular amusements focused on the barbaric pleasures of bear-baiting, cock-fighting, or pulling the heads off geese. Nevertheless, the foundation laid by the Scientific Revolution would prove so important, that less than 350 years after Galileo became the first person to observe the moons surface, human beings would step foot on that surface. French Reformation France was affected by the Protestant Reformation in a manner different from any other country. Though a devout Catholic, Francis I Valois (1515-47) initially maintained an attitude of tolerance towards French Protestants, who became known as Huguenots. This was in part in a accordance with his own Humanist attitude, but mainly in the hope of turning the hostility between Protestant German princes and his great rival Charles V Habsburg to his own political advantage. This changed with an event known as the Affair of the Placards (1534), when radical Huguenots unwisely indulged in publicly plastering anti-Catholic placards across France; one even reaching the royal apartments, a shocking breach of the king's security. The persecution of Protestants increased, causing some to flee the country, among them a certain John Calvin. Despite this, the number of Protestants in France continued to grow, and by the mid-16th-century, predominantly Catholic France had a substantial Huguenot minority scattered across the country and of all classes, from the lower orders to urban bourgeoisie and to parts of the aristocracy; among them even members of the powerful Bourbon family, a branch of the royal family. French Protestantism thus came to acquire a distinctly political character. Catholic and Protestant noble factions would fight a series of destructive and intermittent conflicts, as much a struggle for power against the centralizing state, as a religious struggle. The French Wars of Religion (1562-1598) gained impetus with the unexpected death of Francis' eldest son, Henry II Valois (1547-59), in a jousting tournament. For the next three decades, the throne of France was occupied in turn by Henry's three young sons. The real power lay in the regency of their mother, Catherine de' Medici (d. 1589), passionately committed to the Roman Catholic cause. As persecution continued, disaffected Huguenots managed to convince themselves that the young king himself was not really anti-Protestant, and if they liberated him from his mother's influence, then things would get better. This culminated in an attempt to kidnap the king known as the Amboise Conspiracy (1560). The plot was betrayed, and fail, but it convinced many on the Catholic side that the Huguenots were enemies of France. Nevertheless, Catherine's main concern was to retain a balance of power between the factions, which would keep her own family on the throne. To this end, she issued the Edict of Saint-Germain (1562) granting religious tolerance to Huguenots. For many Catholic nobles though this was a step too far, and France soon descended into open hostilities between Catholics and Protestants. After eight years of intermittent warfare and sectarian atrocities it became clear that neither side was able to defeat the other, and a more solid peace was agreed in 1570. The regent, Catherine de Medici, was still trying to maintain a balance between the religious divisions in the country. She now arranged for her daughter to marry Henry of Navarre (d. 1610), a member of the Huguenot faction and himself a Protestant. The wedding in Paris in August 1572 was of course attended by all the prominent Huguenots, among them Gaspard de Coligny. Despite the recent peace, he was pursuing an alliance between the Huguenots and Protestant England, a controversial if understandable act given the breakdown of two previous agreements. Four days after the wedding, an assassin made a failed attempt on Coligny's life; the queen regent has been traditionally blamed, but most modern historians find this improbable. The St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre (24 August 1572), which erupted two days later, has stained Catherine's reputation ever since. Expecting a Huguenot uprising to avenge the attack, she over-reacted and ordered a massacre of any Huguenots they could find in Paris, including Coligny himself. The bloodbath that followed was soon beyond the control of Catherine or any other leader, as Catholic mods took to the streets. The violence consumed Paris for almost a week, and quickly spread to the province, where it lasted several more weeks, before finally dying down. Perhaps 20,000 Huguenots had been butchered. The massacre marked a turning point in the French Wars of Religion. The Huguenot political movement was crippled by the loss of leadership, but those who remained were increasingly radicalized. Open hostilities resumed, and even the ascension of Henry III (1574-89) could not stop it; he was Catherine's third son and France first adult king for 5-years. Henry's reign was the stuff of melodrama. His own youngest brother Francis rebelled against him, and made an alliance with the Huguenots. The brothers did eventually reconcile, shortly before Francis' death in 1584. With the king's bothers all dead, and himself childless, the legitimate heir to the throne was now his brother-in-law and cousin, the Protestant Henry of Navarre. The religious turmoil that had racked France for a decade, was thus tranformed into a succession crisis, known as the War of the Three Henry's (1584-94), between three factions: King Henry III supported by moderate Catholic royalists; Henry of Navarre supported by the Huguenots; and Henry of Guise, the leader of the hardline Catholic League who sought to exclude Protestants from the succession. When the king wasn't battling with the Huguenots funded by Protestant England and the Dutch Netherlands, he was clashing with the Catholic League supported by Catholic Spain. Military battles and civilian bloodshed dragged on for years, until the culmination in 1589 when King Henry III succeeded in having Henry of Guise assassinated. Less than a year later, Henry III was himself murdered in revenge by a Catholic fanatic; with him died the royal house of Valois. It took Henry of Navarre, now Henry IV, several years to conquer his kingdom. Paris, devoutly Catholic and strongly defended, was his main obstacle. Finally realising that there was no prospect of a Protestant king ruling overwhelmingly Catholic France, Henry IV finally brought peace by an unprecedented act in the era of the Protestant Reformation; he agreed to convert to Roman Catholicism in 1593. It may well be that Henry IV never said the famous remark attributed to him, "Paris is well worth a mass", but the sentiment is true to history. , but was one of the first to be restored.]] Acceptance of Henry IV Bourbon (1589-1610) as king was by no means a foregone conclusion. Catholic nobles doubted the sincerity of Henry's conversion, while Protestant hopes were dashed for complete reform of the French Church. To deal with the former, the king declared war on Spain, which funded Catholic opposition. The conflict mostly consisted of military action against Catholic French rebels, though the Spanish launched a concerted offensive, capturing Amiens as well as Calais, which the French had recovered from England in 1558 as part of the Italian Wars. When French recaptured Amiens in September 1587 with heavy Spanish losses, the war quickly petered out. To deal with Protestant opposition, Henry promulgated the Edict of Nantes (1598), which guaranteed near equal rights to Huguenots in predominantly Catholic France. Although a landmark step on the path to the modern notions of religious freedom and secularism, the concessions were bitterly resented by the Catholic majority. They would be steadily chipped away at, until the Edict was finally revoked by Louis XIV. Henry was now faced with the task of rebuilding a shattered kingdom and restoring the royal position. In foreign policy, he took a conciliatory approach, negotiating peace and commercial treaties with Spain, England, and the Dutch Netherlands, bringing France 12-years of very productive calm. At home, he was fortunate to have the very capable services of his first minister, Maximilien of Sully. The chief need was to put the state finances on a sound footing, by enforcing existing taxation and eliminating corruption. One innovation was a new tax that allowed royal officials to make their offices inheritable. While there were some negative consequences, it gave officials a stake in strengthening the royal government, and helped keep general taxation relatively low. Having succeeded in building an annual surplus, the money was poured into building roads and bridges, including Pont Neuf in Paris. His most ambitious project was the 35-mile-long Briare Canal, completed in 1642, joining the Seine and Loire rivers; it pioneered a great age of integrated waterway systems. Henry also took steps to promote education, agriculture, industry, and commerce. His vision extended beyond France. The French colonization of North America truly began during his reign, laying the foundations of New France (now Canada). Considered a usurper by some Catholics and a traitor by some Protestants, Henry survived numerous assassination attempts, before being murder in a Paris street in 1610 by a Catholic whose precise motives are unclear. He gained more admirers after his death. The "Good King Henry" was remembered for his geniality, and great concern about the welfare of his subjects. He was also known as the "Green Gallant" for his numerous mistresses. When Henry IV died, he had had six children by his second wife in the previous nine years, a remarkable achievement considering he had at least nine more illegitimate children with four different mistresses. He was succeeded by his nine-years-old son Louis XIII. Children of Henry VIII in England Henry VIII had succeeded in leaving a male heir, but only just. Ascending to the throne at nine years of age, Edward VI Tudor (1547-53 AD) was a sickly child. Yet, it was during Edward's six-year reign that two successive regents pressed ahead with establishing a distinctive Anglican Church. Henry had severed the English Church from Rome, but had been no reformer and the newly established Church of England amounted to little more than the existing Catholic Church, with the king rather than the Pope as its head. From 1547, Protestantism advanced rapidly through the systematic reformation of doctrine, worship, and the adoption of the Book of Common Prayer (1549), modelled on the Calvinist tradition. Yet, the English Reformation would have to pass through fire before it was tempered into its final form. When Edward died at just fifteen, he was succeeded by his sister Mary I Tudor (1553-58 AD), a staunch Catholic by virtue of her Spanish mother Catherine of Aragon. In her five-year reign, she applied herself with vigour to the task of reimposing Roman Catholicism on England, and if she had lived as long as her sister Elizabeth she probably would have succeeded. Despite her posthumous moniker Bloody Mary, in her early reign her resolute Catholicism was laced with realism: there was to be no restoration of Church property; diehard Protestant leaders were encouraged to emigrate; and married Protestant clergy were simply given a choice to renounce their wives or their ministry. In thousands of parish churches, the restored Catholic worship was welcomed. Mary’s plans were torpedoed as much by her marriage as by the strength of Protestant opposition in England. Her marriage to Prince Phillip Habsburg of Spain, son of Charles V, was deeply unpopular: nationalist feared England would be relegated to just another Habsburg realm; while aligning England with intractably Catholic Spain was too much for Protestants. It provoked France to seize Calais in 1558, and triggered a rebellion in England that almost overthrew Mary. In the aftermath, the last three years of Mary's reign brought the fire and blood she is remembered for. Some 280 Protestant martyrs were burnt at the stake, including the Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer, and the bishops of Gloucester and Rochester. A paltry number when compared to events on the Continent, but it left a indelible mark on the English psyche; albeit a little hypocritical, since Henry VIII (37,000) and Elizabeth I (600) are remembered more favourably. Mary was thirty-eight and desperate to give birth to an heir, who would displace from the succession her Protestant sister Elizabeth. However, she only suffered numerous false pregnancies and disappointment. Deeply unpopular by the end of her reign, many people were ready to rise-up against her, when she fell sick. On her deathbed Mary was no doubt well aware that her dogmatic efforts had been in vain. Her reign had merely bequeath to England an abiding hatred of Roman Catholicism. When Elizabeth I Tudor (1558-1603 AD) ascended to the throne, England was in need of calm, after the religious friction of the past two reigns. She acted swiftly to re-establish the Act of Supremacy and the Church of England, but otherwise attempted to achieve a moderate climate that would neither inflame the Protestant Puritans, nor drive the Roman Catholics to rebellion. Nevertheless, Catholics did suffer religious persecution and some 210 were executed, especially in the latter years of her reign. Elizabeth also made peace with both France and her ally Scotland, accepting terms for the loss of Calais; Mary had embroiled England in yet another French and Spanish conflict, in support of her Spanish husband. Throughout her reign, the Queen relied heavily on an intensely loyal and capable privy council, led by William Cecil (d. 1598). Together they tamed parliament with tact combined with firmness, and took steps to improve the economy and boost trade, establishing the Royal Exchange in 1568 to act as a centre of commerce for the City of London. Ascending to the throne at just twenty-five, it was expected that Elizabeth would marry and produce heirs to continue the Tudor line, but she never did, despite no shortage of suitors. Her reasons were never clear, but we can speculate some combination of: her father’s treatment of his wives, especially the execution of her own mother; reluctance to lose her own independence as head of state; and the political advantage of dangling the possibility of a marriage alliance. Instead she borrowed biblical imagery and became known as the Virgin Queen; perhaps the first English monarch to create a cult of personality. It paid off. Her 45-year reign was a period of boundless English optimism, characterised by the cultural explosion that produced playwrites William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, poets Edmund Spenser and John Donne, philosopher Francis Bacon. The biggest threat facing Elizabeth was a plot to replace her with her Catholic cousin Mary Queen of Scots (1542-67), the next in line of succession. Mary had briefly been queen of France too, married to the second of the three sons of Francis I, and a ruler of Scotland with strong French backing would be a danger to England in any case. Yet, Elizabeth cleverly outmaneuvered her rival, by introducing her to the handsome and charming but unscrupulous Henry Darnley, who she married. The last seven years of Mary's reign in Scotland was a period of extraordinary melodrama. While she had been away in the French court, the Protestant Reformation (1546-60) had swept through Scotland led by the powerful preacher John Knox (d. 1572). Her personal confrontations with Knox at Holyrood were just the first instalment; Knox's biography does nothing to conceal his own ferocious insolence to the young queen. Darnley became jealous of Mary's private secretary and had him murdered. He even plotted to kill Mary herself in order to seize the throne, but she murdered him first with a bomb. Mary soon married the man who was widely rumoured to have planted the bomb. This scandal proved one too many, uniting the Catholic and Protestant nobles in rebellion. Mary was eventually forced to abdicate, with her one-year-old son becoming James IV Stuart (1567-1625). Mary threw herself on Elizabeth's mercy, apparently expected her cousin to help her regain her throne in Scotland. Yet Mary's presence in England prompted the most dangerous rebellion of Elizabeth's reign, when English Catholics in northern England tried to depose her; the Rising of the North (1569-70). After the uprising fizzled out, Mary was imprisoned. For nearly twenty years, Elizabeth was half the time sure that Mary should be executed, and half the time sure that she should do no such thing; Queens were rare, for one to kill another was surely unwise. Mary was finally executed in 1587. The latter half of the 16th century saw a shift in England’s traditional alignment in Europe. For centuries France had been England's main enemy, but now the threat was increasingly seen to be Catholic Spain. Religion was an obvious cause of the shift, especially when England began financially supporting a Protestant uprising in the Habsburg Netherlands. However, another was the activities of English sea captains like John Hawkins (d. 1595), Walter Raleigh (d. 1618), and especially Francis Drake (d. 1596) in the Caribbean, with the queen’s active support. At best these privateers infringed Spain's trading monopoly, and at worst would rob any Spanish vessel they can overpower. The English incursions on Spanish interests escalated in 1579, when Drake captured a fat defenceless Spanish vessel in the previously safe Pacific, during his voyage round the world in 1577-80; it was carrying 80 lbs. of gold and 26 tons of silver. By the time Drake departed Plymouth for the Caribbean in 1585 with a fleet of about thirty ships, his activities looked more like an expedition of war. These provocations finally persuaded Philip II of Spain (1556-98) that he must invade England. In August 1588, the Spanish Armada of 130 ships sailed from northern Spain, with the intention of gaining control over the English Channel and escorting an invasion army from Habsburg Belgium to England. In contrast to the Spanish heavy galleons which were devastating at close range, the English fleet consisted of smaller and swifter vessels, firing lighter cannon balls over a greater range. The English, under the command of Lord Howard of Effingham, successfully harried the Spanish off Plymouth, Portland Bill and the Isle of Wight but did little damage, and the Armada safely reached Calais. While she waited to pick-up the army, the English sent fire ships into the harbour causing the Spanish to cut their cables in disarray. In the ensuing Battle of Gravelines north of Calais, the nibbler English fleet provoked the Armada until she ran out of shot, whereupon the English did some serious damage, sinking five Spanish ships. The Spanish fleet then attempted to take the battered fleet round Scotland and into the Atlantic. However, unfamiliar with the Gulf Stream, the fleet was struck by strong winds and heavy sea, with many ships wrecked on the Scottish and Irish coasts; in the end, only 67 ships limped back to Spain. The next year, the English tried to press their advantage with their own Armada expeditions in 1589, 1595 and 1597, but all ended in severe defeats. The Anglo-Spanish War (1585–1604) would finally be settled by Elizabeth and Phillip’s successors in the Treaty of London (1604). Elizabeth's reign is known as the Elizabethan Era, a Golden Age famous for the flourishing of the English Renaissance, for the seafaring prowess of English adventurers, and for one of the greatest military victories in English history. Her choice for successor would also have profound implications for the future of England and Scotland; her cousin, the son of Mary Queen of Scots, King James VI Stuart of Scotland. Tudor Conquest of Ireland Since the Anglo-Norman conquest of Ireland in the 12th century, the English kings had among their title, Lord of Ireland. Yet the Anglo-Irish nobles may have pledged allegiance to the English king, but in truth they were loyal only to themselves. In 1297, a permanent government had been set up structured on English lines with Dublin acquiring its own exchequer and parliament. Yet, this was the high-point of English lordship of Ireland. First, a year after Bannockburn (1315), the brother of Robert the Bruce, Edward, landed in Ireland with 6000 Scots. All the Gaelic-Irish and a considerable number of Anglo-Normans rallied to his cause of ending the rule of their English overlord. Although the uprising was put down after three years with the death of Edward Bruce at the Battle of Faughart (1318 AD), great swathes of land had been taken by the Gaelic Irish that would never be recovered. Thirty years later in 1348, there was an even more disastrous arrival in Ireland; the Black Death. The Black Death ravaged the towns and ports where the Anglo-Normans were strongest. As the Gaelic-Irish exploited English weakness, not only were large parts of the country recovered, but the Irish language and customs came to dominate once again, even among the Anglo-Norman nobles. From 1367, the English parliament in Ireland tried to legislate against such cultural assimilation, describing the Anglo-Normans as "more Irish than the Irish themselves", but with little effect. With England distracted by the Hundred Years' War and War of the Roses, by the end of the 15th century, direct English authority had virtually disappeared outside of the area around Dublin known as the Pale, with the powerful Anglo-Norman Fitzgerald family in Kildare becoming effectively the rulers of Ireland. Ireland had long been something of a thorn in the side of England, a place for English rebels to retreat to beyond the reach of the crown. This situation dramatically changed when Henry VIII declared himself head of the Protestant Church in England, with the Act of Supremacy (1534). Silken Thomas Fitzgerald, Earl of Kildare, a fervent Catholic, went into open rebelled against the crown, but his rebellion failed and he was executed in 1537. In the aftermath, Henry resolved to bring Ireland under English crown control. In 1541, he upgraded Ireland from a lordship to a full Kingdom, and implemented the policy of surrender and regrant over the Anglo-Norman and Gaelic-Irish nobles. In practice, nobles around Ireland accepted their new overlord but carried on as they had before. The Tudor Reconquest of Ireland (1536-1607) to establish centralised English control over the whole of Ireland took nearly a century, during which the country was plagued by rebellions and turmoil. By the end of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I it was plainly evident that the Protestant Reformation had failed in Ireland. One commentator estimated that at the end of the sixteenth century, Dublin had only twenty Irish-born householders attending Protestant church services. If the crown couldn’t enforce its will in the capital, then the Reformation was virtually impossible in the rest of the country; the same commentator estimated that there were less than 120 Irish-born Protestants in the entire country. The somewhat oversimplified explanation often given for the failure is that it was imposed by a foreign power in a foreign language. Certainly both the Gaelic Irish and old Anglo-Irish nobles energetically resisted Protestantism, with religion serving as a rallying point for opposition to English rule and the curtailment of their independence. Language was ultimate fuel that drove the Reformations, with the idea of preaching Christianity in the people’s own language. Yet, the Protestant Church of Ireland was culturally English, with Church reformers making little effort to learn the native Gaelic language. Thus there was the rather bizarre situation of a Reformation which preached in a foreign language; Gaelic remained the language majority tongue until as late as 1800. In England and Wales, the crown had subordinated the Catholic Church by promoting Protestants to senior positions throughout the Church with striking speed. In Ireland, with limited interaction with the Continent, there was no grassroots movement for reform; the fragmented nature of Ireland prior to the Tudor reconquest meant that there were not the same opportunities for Church corruption. Centralised English rule over Ireland was only firmly established in the 17th century, when the Catholic Counter Reformations was in full effect, thus new Catholic priest returned from their education on the Continent with a firm intellectual grounding that Protestantism found impossible to break. The example of Ireland was peculiar but not entirely unique; the Calvinist rulers of Brandenburg and Lemgo in imperial Germany failed in their attempts to impose their religion over their realms. The failure of the Protestant Reformation in Ireland would leave a poisonous legacy, in a Europe where religion was a battleground, and political and religious loyalty were seen as one-and-the-same. It led to centuries of persecution and oppression; no Catholic could hold any public office anywhere in the British Isles until Catholic Emancipation in the mid-19th century. A quarter-century of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland from 1970, shows all too vividly that the dark side of the Reformation is not entirely a thing of the past. Rebellions were endemic in Ireland, at least until about 1700 when the country finally settled into an uneasy peace, and these were often crushed with astonishing brutality, out of fears that the rebels would link-up with England's foreign enemies. For Protestants, events such as the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre (1572) in Paris, came to define the terror of the Catholic Counter Reformation, and the urgency needed for the Irish problem. Yet Ireland's lack of unity would often play into the hands of the English, with one Irish noble used to crush another. The Desmond Rebellions in Munster of 1569–73 and 1579–83, were crushed not only with scorched earth warfare but with the help of the local earl of Ormonde, seeking the favour of the English crown. By 1590, six decades after the start of the Tudor reconquest, Elizabeth had subdued the Irish in Munster, Leinster, and Connaught, but there was one great obstacle to English dominance in Ireland, in a province that would become synonymous with the conflict between the two islands. Ulster was the most Gaelic of the four provinces, and the stronghold of the O’Neill and O’Donnell chieftains, who through compromise and manoeuvring had retained their lands and nominal autonomy. But with English attention and encroachment increasingly turning to the north, Ulster went into open rebellion in the most seriour threat yet to the Tudor reconquest; the Nine Years’ War (1594-1603 AD). Bolstered by Spanish advisors, Hugh O'Neill won victories at the Battles of Clontibret (March 1595) and the Yellow Ford (August 1598), securing firm control of Ulster and sparking rebellions elsewhere, notably in recently troubled Munster. Inevitably in a country plagued by squabbling nobles, Hugh O'Neil explicitly used the Catholic religion to unify the rebels, which also brought powerful foreign enemies to the Irish cause. O’Neill appealed to Spain for help, at the time England’s main enemy. Already at war in the Netherlands, Philip III of Spain sent a Spanish army of some 6,000 soldier to support the rebels by seizing the port of Cork. However, the expedition was plagued by bad luck, with bad weather meaning just 4,500 landed at Kinsale thirty miles from Cork in September 1601, and was immediately besieged by the English. O’Neill marched south to lift the siege. Although the sides were evenly matched, he far from his homeland and tactically outmatched at the Battle of Kinsale (1602) and routed. Kinsale was a turning point in Irish history. O’Neill and O’Donnell were stripped of much of their land, but initially pardoned for their uprising. However, after the Gunpowder Plot in 1605, it became impossible to be a Catholic noble in Protestant Britain. In 1607, they fled Ireland for the Continent in the hopes of restarting the uprising; the Flight of the Earls. With peace agreed between England and Spain in 1604, it proved impossible to find foreign support; Hugh O'Neill died in Rome in 1616. Meanwhile, in 1609 the first phase of the Plantation of Ulster was begun. If Ireland could not be made loyal, then new ruling class would be transplanted to the country; English and Scottish Protestants loyal to the crown were granted land in Ulster to pacify the rebellious region. This was not just land grabbing nobles, but small traders and farmers; social engineering on a grand scale. By the end of the reign of Elizabeth's successor, only one quarter on the land in Ulster remained in Irish Gaelic hands. Ulster was being transformed from the most Gaelic region in Ireland, into a Protestant stronghold. The Reformation had created the most enduring division in Irish history, these settlers would never be assimilated into Irish society as the Norman-English had. And this was just the first phase, another would follow the Eleven Years' War (1641-53). Rise of the Dutch Throughout the Middle Age, the Low Countries were a patchwork of squabbling petty-duchies and free-cities, like much of imperial Germany. The cities of Flanders bloomed as cloth towns, while coastal cities such as Deventer, Zwolle, and Bruges flourished as part of the Hanseatic League, the long-distance Baltic trade network, as well as becoming adept at shipbuilding. In 1433, most of what is now the Netherlands and Belgium were eventually united by Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy, which limited the freedom of the towns, but also brought a degree of stability to the region. By 1482, the Low Countries acquired a new ruling dynasty, the House of Habsburgs. A growing sense of resentment at being at being on the periphery of the vast Habsburg empire was largely masked during the reign of Charles V Habsburg (1516-56), born in Ghent. Even so, during these four decades, with the Reformation spreading throughout Europe, the Dutch in particular energetically embraced Protestantism, with religion serving as a rallying point for opposition to largely absentee rule; almost an antithesis to the situation in Ireland. These circumstances would lead to unrest at the best of times, but Charles' successor Philip II of Spain (1556-1598) aggravated them. A strong believer in the Inquisition, Philip went after the Protestants with a vengeance. Matters came to a head in 1566, when puritan mobs went on a rampage across the Low Countries, destroying religious icons of Catholic churches. Philip's response was severe. He ordered the Duke of Alba to restore order; a veteran of many campaigns and not one to take prisoners. Alba's rule of terror in the Low Countries began with the quiet efficiency of a modern police state; some fifteen hundred dissident nobles and commoners were arrested in their homes in the early hours, tried and executed. So began the protracted Dutch War of Independence (1568–1648). Opposition to Spanish rule coalesced under Prince William I of Orange, one of the few Dutch noble to elude Alba and slip into exile; grandfather of William of Orange, king of England. The first real successes for the rebels were privateers, that the Spanish dismissively labelled Sea Beggars. In April 1972, the privateers captured the port of Brielle, a minor success but it prompted a fresh wave of rebellion. Up and down the northern coast of the Low Countries, ports expelled their Spanish garrisons and declared for William. The Duke of Alba fought hard to recover what had been lost, committing appalling atrocities in his campaign, until he was replaced in December 1973. It gradually became clear that parts of the Low Countries were seeking independence from Spain, while the southern regions which had largely remained Catholic were much more open to compromise with Spain. The hope of solidarity was finally broken by a fresh wave of extreme Protestant violence in Ghent in 1578, with Catholic churches sacked and monks burned in the market place. In January 1579, the southern regions formed the Union of Arras, for the purpose of defending the Catholic faith, and soon reconciled with the Spanish crown in return for a large measure of administrative freedom; the future Belgium, although she would not become an independent state until 1831. Later that same month, the seven more rebellious provinces in the north formed an explicitly anti-Spanish alliance that became known as the United Provinces, the basis for the Netherlands as we know it today. Even then, it remained far from certain what type of independence they had in mind. William of Orange was not considered to have the necessary royal stature required for a replacement king, who was anyway assassinated in 1584. Thus the Netherlands gradually settled into a loose political structure: each province was an independent republic with an appointed chief executive who had one vote in a combined parliament. After the assassination of William of Orange, two provinces appoint his son Maurice as their chief executive, and the others gradually followed suit, making the House of Orange effectively the royal family of a republic. Nevertheless, the structure was so progressive for the times, that it even alarmed England, which had the most well-established parliament. Yet this did not prevent both England and France nominally allying with the Netherlands in their continuing war with Spain. Another half century would passed until the independence of the Netherlands and peace with Spain were finally established by the Peace of Westphalia (1648), that ended the Thirty Years War. Even before peace was settled, the Dutch were demonstrating their skill at business and sailing in the East and the Americas, ushering in a Dutch Golden Age of economic prosperity and cultural fruition. Autocratic Rule in Russia If Ivan the Great laid the foundations of the Russian state, then the autocratic and despotic character that would define the Russian Tsars were laid by his grandson, Ivan IV (1533-84), known to history as Ivan the Terrible, although the Russian translation is closer to formidable. Ivan inherited the throne at just three-years-of-age. The violent struggles during his regency between factions of the nobility would have a profound influence on his subsequent reign. Young Ivan became determined to clip the wings of Russia's nobility by creating a strong centralised state; a policy admittedly common to any 16th-century monarch. Ivan took the reins of power in 1547, and weeks later married his first wife Anastasia Romanov. The early years of his reign were constructive. His government embarked on a wide-ranging reform program of the tax and legal system, and local and national government, as well as creating a standing army based on merit. The central aim of his reforms was to limit the powers of the hereditary nobility, and promote the interests of the service gentry, who held their landed estates solely as compensation for government service and were thus completely loyal to the Tsar. Yet his method were often unscrupulous and disruptive to trade and society. Russia was at war for the greater part of Ivan’s reign. Campaigns to the south and east against hostile khanates extended Moscow's control to the mouth of the Volga on the Caspian Sea and to Ural Mountains. Ivan commissioned St. Basil's Cathedral in Moscow's Red Square to commemorate these victories. He was less successful in the west, where the twenty-four-year Livonian War (1558–1583), against a confederation of Lithuania, Poland, Sweden and Denmark, proved fruitless in Russia's long struggle for a Baltic sea-port; a struggle only ended in 1703 under Peter the Great. The death of his first wife Anastasia in 1560 sent Ivan into a deep depression and his behavior became more erratic and paranoia; he suspected that she had been poisoned. The last 24 years of his life assumed the character of the reign of terror. He was prone to breathtaking outbreaks of violence. Many hereditary nobles perished through his bloody purges, often being publicly executed with calculated cruelty. In 1570 he personally led his troops against the wealthy city of Novgorod, which was suspected of planning to defect to Lithuania. The city was sacked and several thousand of its inhabitants executed. A devout Orthodox Christian, in his old age he sent money to monasteries with a list of more than 3,000 of his victims for whom the monks were to pray. In one fit of rage, Ivan even beat his pregnant daughter-in-law for wearing immodest clothing, causing her to have a miscarriage. When his son confronted him, Ivan struck him with a staff and mortally wounding his only viable heir. So it was that upon Ivan's death, the Russian throne was left to his feeble-minded son Feodor (1584-98). Yet Feodor's reign, dominated by his advisor Boris Godunov, was largely successful. Conquests in the east brought Russia into western Siberia, continuing the century long expansion that would eventually bring Russia to the Pacific. Measures to restrict the movement of peasants between landlords brought rural stability with less good effects; Russian serfdom would prevail until 1861 when Alexander II finally abolished it. When Feodor died childless, Boris Godunov (1598-1605) was elected Tsar himself by an assembly of nobles. Yet almost inevitably his reign was dominated by nobles scheming to regain their lost power, and Russia eventually descended into a period of civil war and foreign intervention known as the Time of Troubles (1606–13), from which would emerge a distant relation of Ivan the Terrible, Michael Romanov. Rivals in the Age of Discovery Throughout the 16th century, Spain and Portugal had a virtual monopoly on the Age of Discovery, and for now it suited both Iberian nations to remain on friendly terms. This was reflected in many marriage alliances; King Manuel I of Portugal (1495-1521) married three successive wives from the Spanish royal family. The Portuguese then established a chain of trading-posts along India's west coast, Sri Lanka, and gradually up the east coast; the city of Goa was conquered in 1510 becoming the seat of Portuguese Colonial India until 1961. They also forced the local ruler to ceded to them the island of Bombay in 1534. Meanwhile, they conquered Malacca in Malaysia in 1511, guarding the narrowest channel of the route southeast to the Spice Islands. Meanwhile in 1557, Portuguese merchants established a trading-post on the island of Macao, off the south coast of China. Portugal would monopolise the long sea route round Africa to India and the Spice Islands until the early 17th century, when the Dutch and English began to challenge her hegemony in the Indian Ocean. While the Spanish were conquering the Americas, the Portuguese had no European rivals on the long sea route round Africa to India and the East. The profitable trade in eastern spices was cornered by the Portuguese, undercutting the Venetian trade with its profusion of middlemen. They also traded with China and Japan, establishing colonies at Macau in 1557 and Nagasaki in 1569. Japan's reputation as pirates meant direct trade between China and Japan was restricted, so the Portuguese filled this commercial vacuum establishing a lucrative triangular trade; buying Chinese silks, selling them at a profit in Japan, and then buying more silks for the return journey to Europe. With a population of less than 2 million, Portugal did not to fully exploit her trade monopoly. Overextended, she failed to develop a substantial domestic infrastructure to support these activities: Dutch ships ferried the precious eastern cargoes from Lisbon to northern Europe; and foreigners provided most of the financing for their trading enterprises. The Portuguese were also slow to exploit the discovery of Brazil; named for its most valuable natural product, Paubrasilia, a red wood much in demand for dye. With her focus on the profitable eastern trade and growing involvement in the African slave-trade, in 1533, the king came up with the solution of dividing the coastline into fifteen sections, and granting these strips of land on a hereditary basis to fifteen courtiers to colonise. As elsewhere, sugar plantations became the basis of the economy of Portuguese Brazil. France and England looked on enviously at the wealth that Portugal derived from trade with the East. The Treaty of Tordesillas dividing the world between Spain and Protugal was of little consequence, with king Francis I of France famously quipping, "Show me Adam's will!". France was the first to seek a new western route to the same pot of gold. In 1534, the French king sent Jacques Cartier with two ships and sixty-one men to look for a Northwest Passage linking the Atlantic with the Pacific. His three voyages ended in failure, he mapped the great inlet of the St. Lawrence River as far as Montreal; an attempt to establish a colony near Quebec was abandoned after two years of disease, foul weather and hostile natives. Yet Cartier's discoveries would eventually prompt the interest of French fur traders to these regions; New France (1534–1763). While the French were searching for a way north of America to China and the Indies, the English believed that there may be a route north of Russia. In 1553, three ships set-out from London under the command of Hugh Willoughby, but the expedition proved incompetent and ill-prepared. Six months later Willoughby, with two of his ships, was stranded for the Arctic winter on a bleak shore of the Barents Sea, and, with no suitable clothing or provisions, everyone starved and froze to death. Yet the third ship, separated from the others in a storm, reached the Russian port of Archangel. The captain was invited to visit the Tsar court in Moscow, where he inadvertently help open-up flourishing trade relations between England and Russia. England makes tentative first steps towards establishing a presence beyond the ocean in the same decade as Spain and Portugal, the 1490s. In 1497 Henry VII sends John Cabot on an expedition across the Atlantic to look for a trade route to China. The explorer probably reaches Newfoundland, but his journey provides no lasting result (apart from a theoretical claim to Canada, and news of the rich fishing potential in north Atlantic waters). The wealth of Spain's new colonies in the Americas derived mainly from silver; notably Potosí in modern day Bolivia, and Zacatecas in Mexico. The precious bullion was carried via Havana back to Seville in Spain by the Spanish Treasure Fleet, which began to operate in 1566 AD; by the end of the century it encompassed 50 ships. In addition to bullion, the convoy system ferried goods from the East; by By 1571, Spain had established a presence in the Philippines, with trade routes via Mexico back to Europe. On the return journey, the Treasure Fleet delivered European goods needed in the colonies, bought from throughout Europe, for even the whole of Spain could not provide all the raw materials and manufactured goods required. Spain essentially removed her major rival in the Age of Discovery in 1581, when Philip II of Spain intervened in a succession crisis in Portugal and absorbed the county into Spain, albeit with some nominal autonomy. Yet the disruption merely prompted the decline of the Portuguese Empire, and provided opportunities for foreign rivals; the enemies of Spain became the enemies of Portugal. English and French seamen were already honing their skills, raiding the Spanish main as privateers. Yet the first inheritors of Portugal’s supremacy in trade with the East would be the Dutch. The Netherlands had had a monopoly on ferrying the precious Eastern cargoes from Lisbon to northern Europe, but with Portugal's incorporation in the Iberian Union these markets were closed to them. Thus, the Dutch decided to set sail on their own to acquire the goods for themselves; the first successful Dutch expedition round the Africa to the far east occurred in 1595. The early 17th century would see the end of the Spanish and Portuguese monopoly both in the Americas and the far east. Category:Historical Periods